Who was Umar ‘Abdu r-Raḥman, who preached terrorism and the Qur'an
The spiritual leader of an extremist movement died at the age 79 in a North Carolina prison. He had backed the 1993 attack against the World Trade Center. Recently, the political wing of Al-jamāʻah al-islāmīyah had requested his release on health grounds. He supported terrorism as a weapon of jihad.
Cairo (AsiaNews) – Umar ‘Abdu r-Raḥman, leader of Egypt’s Al-jamāʻah al-islāmīyah (Islamic Group), an organisation accused of terrorism, died a few days ago in prison in Butner, North Carolina, where he was serving a life sentence, his oldest daughter Asmaa announced in a statement.
To understand so-called Islamic terrorism, it is important to know his story. The extremist leader, who was 79 when he died, took part in the planning of the car bomb attack against New York's World Trade Center in February 1993., which left six people dead.
Shaykh Umar ‘Abdu r-Raḥman was accused of planning other attacks, included some against the United Nations building in New York.
According to Turkish media, the CIA told his family in Cairo to make a formal request at the US Embassy in Egypt to allow a seriously ill Umar ‘Abdu r-Raḥman to spend his last days in his homeland. In the end, this did not change the Muslim leader’s fate, who died on 18 February in a US cell.
Last November, Khalid al Sharif, media adviser for the Building and Development Party (Hizb el-Benaa wa el-Tanmia), the political wing of the Al-jamāʻah al-islāmīyah, appealed to outgoing President Barack Obama, asking for amnesty on health grounds since r-Raḥmam, in addition to blindness, was suffering from advanced pancreatic cancer and hypertension.
"Dr Umar’s release would extinguish the fire of Muslim anger against the United States and its racist policy against the Arabs," al Sharif had said. "We do not harbour any grudge against the American people, and we believe in the complementarity, not the clash of civilisations."
The Al-jamāʻah al-islāmīyah leader was born in 1938 in Daqahliya Governorate, northeastern Egypt. He lost his eyesight when he was a child; however, this did not prevent him from getting a preacher's degree from al-Azhar University.
He came under the influence of Ibn Taymiyyah and Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual founders of Salafist and fundamentalist currents in the Muslim world.
He spent time in Egyptian prisons because of his positions against the Egyptian government. Later he was accused of involvement in the assassination of Muhammad Anwar as-Sādāt, Egypt’s third president, in 1981. He was acquitted for lack of evidence but was expelled from Egypt.
In 1993 he made a famous statement, saying “If those who have the right to have something are terrorists, then we are terrorists, and we welcome being terrorists . . . the Qur'an makes it, terrorism, among the means to perform jihad in the sake of Allah, which is to terrorise the enemies of God."
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22/01/2018 13:25
05/01/2006
